Guidelines is an unsettling piece of contemporary theatre that turns the familiar act of scrolling through social media into a live, embodied experience. Created by CONGLOMERATE, the artistic partnership of writer Pip Williams and director James Nash, Guidelines avoids moralising, instead placing its audience inside a hyperactive system where attention is continuously pulled, managed and monetised.
The production opens in darkness with an audio recording of a mother calling her daughter, expressing concern about phone use and exposure to disturbing content. The moment is intimate and uneasy, establishing a tension between care and control that runs throughout the show. When Rachel‑Leah Hosker and Alex McCauley enter, they immediately command the space with a precise, high‑energy performance style.
Rejecting linear storytelling, Guidelines unfolds in fragments. Hosker and McCauley first appear as relentlessly upbeat hosts, delivering website terms and conditions at speed, passing clauses between them with corporate polish. These “guidelines” promise safety, positivity and inclusion, repeatedly insisting that users are “free to leave”. Yet the performance reveals how quickly consent becomes automatic, and how language designed to reassure: joy, care, protection is emptied of meaning through repetition.
This logic extends into sequences that mimic short‑form video feeds. Viral dances, exaggerated gestures and fleeting images flash past at pace, with brief moments of casual violence embedded almost imperceptibly within the choreography. The effect is disturbingly accurate: content is consumed before it can be processed. A recurring reference to a disturbing video of two girls in a forest is repeatedly approached but never shown, allowing unease to accumulate without resolution.
Hosker and McCauley shift fluidly between symbolic embodiment and recognisably human exchanges, including conversations between friends discussing what they may or may not have seen online. In a standout section, they perform at four microphones arranged in a square, delivering rapid‑fire snippets of content while subtly demonstrating how algorithms respond to attention and generate increasingly targeted material.
Patch Middleton’s sound design and Adi Currie’s lighting are tightly integrated, sustaining a sense of acceleration that makes quieter moments feel almost alien. A recurring frog image, distorted and unexplained, operates less as symbolism than as intrusive visual noise, echoing the logic of content that arrives without invitation and lingers without context.
The final image, in which the performers appear in period costume under the names Mary and Elizabeth, lands with dry absurdity. Like a period‑drama character holding a smartphone, it exposes the mismatch between our archaic bodies and the digital systems we now inhabit. Guidelines is sharp, inventive and conceptually assured, but its emotional distance ultimately keeps the audience observing the system rather than fully colliding with it.
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